The Best of Gerald Kersh

by Gerald Kersh

  He had cried out in English.

  When I came to life again, I was lying on the floor in the kitchen of a farmhouse. My clothes had been stripped off, and I was wrapped in a dry cloak. They had put me by the fire, which was blazing bright. I saw, still dimly, a tight-faced officer in a blue uniform, sitting at a table between two pair of candles. Standing beside him and behind him were four other officers in blue. I recognised that tight face: it belonged to Collaert of the Allied cavalry.

  Also, I saw my muddy waistcoat and trousers on a chair. Collaert was holding between a fastidious thumb and forefinger a little piece of paper which I knew. It was my second note. It said:

  Sire! Your guide Lacoste is a spy. His name is de Wissembourg. He is in the pay of the Allies. He intends to misdirect you between Genappe and the plateau of Mont St Jean. Wellington will place his infantry there, behind a sunken road, which leads from Ohain to Braine le Leud. For God’s sake, make reconnaissance of this terrain, against which Wellington hopes you will send cavalry….

  Tessier,

  Colonel (late), Artillery.

  It was anguish of spirit that made me cry out at this, not pain of the body. Someone put something like a rolled-up greatcoat under my head, and the voice of the terra-cotta man murmured in English: ‘No shame in missing your way on a night like last night, in weather like this. Cheer up, monsieur; better luck next time!’ He was Captain Conconnel of Lord Wellington’s staff, but I did not learn that until later.

  I made certain unmistakable motions with my fingers. The Englishman said: ‘He wants to write something.’

  They gave me pencil and paper, and I wrote: Please give me a pistol and allow me to kill myself.

  But they did not. Couriers were dispatched to Wellington with the intelligence which I had believed I had delivered to Napoleon. A doctor came to set my jaw, and later, locked in a bedroom, guarded by a grizzled old English trooper, I lay and listened to the rain on the shutters; and soon I heard the guns of Waterloo, and oh, but I wept bitterly! I had not the strength to lift my hand to wipe my eyes. The trooper came and wiped them for me: he had no handkerchief, so he offered me his cuff, saying: ‘Easy does it, mounseer – steady on, froggie. You’ll be a man before your mother yet….’ But he, also, was listening to the guns….

  I need not tell you what happened. Blücher was delayed, indeed. The English cavalry was cut to pieces, and we had the balance of artillery in our favour. It remained only to break that infernal English infantry, and the battle was in our hands. Napoleon knew this, and therefore he ordered that terrible charge of cuirassiers at the plateau of Mont St Jean. The guide Lacoste – in other words the spy de Wissembourg – was at his elbow at the very moment when he gave that order. Lacoste, as he is called, omitted to mention the ‘hollow road’ of Ohain. There is no stopping a full charge of armoured cavalry, as you know. Before they could begin to pull up, two thousand cuirassiers were in the ditch of Ohain; the remainder were flying in disorder under volley upon volley of musket-fire; demoralisation had set in; the English had re-formed and were attacking; and that was the end of us. Napoleon fled.

  So, brother, France fell: I blame myself for that.

  *

  Tessier sighed, and lit a fresh cigar. Ratapoil said: ‘Come now, old moustache – how can you talk like that? There are more causes than one to any conclusion. You might, for example, also say that Cornelys the blacksmith won the battle of Waterloo because, making eyes at the inn-keeper’s wife, he lamed your mare. No one is to blame … though, had I been you——’

  ‘Don’t say it,’ said Tessier. ‘You asked me to tell you how I lost my teeth, and I have told you. And now, with your kind permission, I will go to bed.’

  In a Room Without Walls

  ‘IF it could only be like this for ever!’ said the quiet girl called Linda, looking over Jimmy’s shoulder at the dim grey face of the clock. ‘Oh, Jimmy, this is heaven! How happy I am! What can I have done, to deserve such happiness?’

  She felt Jimmy smiling. ‘Are you happy too?’ she asked Jimmy. He nodded, observing the reflection of the clock face in the long mirror on the wardrobe door. He had been grimacing.

  Last year, he thought chafing and trying not to fidget, I made a hundred and four thousand five hundred pounds. All that money in three hundred and sixty-five days. It works out at … what? … Twelve-pound-ten an hour. I have given this girl twenty-five pounds’ worth of my time, at that rate. Four shillings and twopence a minute – nearly a penny a second. I’ve thrown away twenty-five pounds, being gracious to Linda for two hours. And she talks of this going on for ever – for ever, at a penny a second! There isn’t that much money in the world!

  Linda, with a luminous glory behind her somewhat faded face, closed her eyes and, resting her chin upon his shoulder and caressing his cheek with her forehead, said: ‘How sweet, Jimmy! How sweet! How can I ever tell you how grateful I am to you for making me so happy? Ah, my dear darling – now, just now, do you know what? I’m so full of love and happiness that another tiny bit would be too much … I’d die. But this is Heaven: I’ll never want any Heaven but this – to be here, with you, exactly like this, loving you as I do and knowing that you love me. You do love me?’

  Jimmy was inclined to say: ‘Oh, nonsense! Love? Ha! You? Bah! What, me? Love you? Who are you? A laundress. I am Jimmy – you know who I am – Jimmy the Star. I could have world-famous actresses, take my choice of the beauties of five continents. The world is mine, and all the women in it. Titled women, even. Because a whim takes hold of me, and I beckon to a poor pale creature in a clutching crowd of infatuated fans – because I, like a god, confer upon you the glory of my intimacy for a moment you talk of love? Love? My love? For you? At four-and-twopence a second, do you realise what a lingering look is worth?’

  But he said: ‘Of course I love you,’ and he looked at the reversed reflection of the clock that told the time.

  ‘All my life,’ said Linda, ‘all my life I’ve dreamt of such a moment. Don’t laugh – I felt somehow that it might happen to me. I never dared to say to anybody that I had a dream of love. They would have laughed; I’m so plain and ordinary, Oh, dear God, but I love you, Jimmy! You’re too good for me!’

  In spite of his seething distaste, Jimmy muttered: ‘Nothing of the sort. Charming girl!’

  ‘Ah, my own dear love! My dream-come-true! Do you know what? I believe you if you say so. I believe! I believe! I believe in you. This morning I was washing sheets, and you were only a picture, a splendid vision. And now I’m here, with you, in your arms, hearing you telling me you love me. There is a God! Where is yesterday? Where is the grey when the sunlight bleaches it away? Why do you love me?’

  ‘Sweet,’ said Jimmy, with his eye on the time. The movement of the big hand was worth thirty-four shillings an inch.

  He was in an ecstasy of boredom and visitation. Oh, to be rid of this ridiculously happy woman! he thought. Why did I do it? Why? Why?

  ‘Tell me why you love me,’ she said. ‘No, never mind. Just say it again.’

  What was Jimmy to say? If he could have said: ‘I only said so to please you. It tickled my vanity to beckon you out of the mob around the stage door. You helped me to condescend, you made me feel greater’ – then he would have been talking like an honest man. If he had had the courage to say: ‘You were such a whole-hearted worshipper that I wanted to be a god,’ then he would not have been where he was at that moment. If he could have told the truth he would have been an honest man – not a man in anguish, caressing a woman with his hand while he gritted his teeth and watched the clock.

  But he said: ‘Of course I love you!’

  There was a silence: it seemed to cling to his ears for a lifetime. Then it came away with a sort of thick sucking noise, and he heard the sharp tick of the round white clock. His face looked drawn in the darkening mirror. He had a desperate yearning to speak a little truth.

  ‘And you promise to stay with me always?’ Linda asked.

  He h
ad meant to say ‘No,’ but heard himself muttering: ‘Mm.’

  ‘Jimmy! Hold me!’

  Although he had intended to get up and go away, Jimmy found himself embracing Linda and looking into her eyes.

  ‘Always?’ she whispered.

  He answered: ‘Always.’ Candour stuck in his throat.

  ‘Oh, Jimmy, if this could go on for ever!’

  Unutterably weary, he muttered: ‘Uh-uh; sure!’ He was sick, sick to the heart, of pent-up truth.

  ‘Did you say “sure”? Do you mean it?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘If you say you mean it, I know you mean it,’ said Linda. ‘Dearest, there is a God. There is a Heaven!’

  ‘Oh yes, yes. Sure, sure,’ said Jimmy, with a half-laugh. ‘This is Heaven, isn’t it?’

  He shifted, meaning to pull himself away from her. Something happened; he moved in the wrong direction. Linda was in his arms.

  ‘It is! It is!’ she whispered.

  He sneered. ‘And hell? Where’s hell?’

  Something comparable to a bladder, a grey strained veinous membrane, seemed to burst in a splash of pure, cold light. Out of the indefinable centre of this light a grave, clear voice said: ‘Think!’

  Jimmy looked at the clock. Its hands still marked seven minutes to four of a drizzling February afternoon.

  He remembered that there had been a judgement, a hundred thousand years ago. Linda, on his shoulder, had achieved paradise; and he was damned. And for all eternity the clock had stopped.

  The Oxoxoco Bottle

  THE fact that the intensely red colour of the glaze on the Oxoxoco Bottle is due to the presence in the clay of certain uranium salts is of no importance. A similar coloration may be found in Bohemian and Venetian glass, for example. No, the archæologists at the British Museum are baffled by the shape of the thing. They cannot agree about the nature or the purpose.

  Dr Raisin, for example, says that it was not designed as a bottle at all, but rather as a musical instrument: a curious combination of the ocarina and the syrinx, because it has three delicately curved slender necks, and immediately below the middle neck, which is the longest, there is something like a finger-hole. But in the opinion of Sir Cecil Sampson, who is a leading authority on ancient musical instruments, the Oxoxoco Bottle was never constructed to throw back sounds. Professor Miller, however, inclines to the belief that the Oxoxoco Bottle is a kind of tobacco pipe: the two shorter necks curve upwards while the longer neck curves downwards to fit mouth and nostrils. Professor Miller indicates that smouldering herbs were dropped in at the ‘finger-hole’ and that the user of the bottle must have inhaled the smoke through all his respiratory passages.

  I have reason to believe that Professor Miller has guessed closest to the truth although, if the document in my possession is genuine, it was not tobacco that they burned in the squid-shaped body of the bottle.

  It was intact, except for a few chips, when I bought it from a mestizo pedlar in Cuernavaca in 1948. ‘Genuine,’ he said; and this seemed to be the only English word he knew: ‘genuine, genuine.’ He pointed towards the mountains and conveyed to me by writhings and convulsions, pointing to earth and sky, that he had picked the bottle up after an earthquake. At last I gave him five pesos for it, and forgot about it until I found it several years later while I was idling over a mass of dusty souvenirs: sombreros, huaraches, a stuffed baby alligator, and other trifles, such as tourists pick up in their wanderings, pay heavily for, and then give away to friends who consign them to some unfrequented part of the house.

  The straw hats and other plaited objects had deteriorated. The stitches in the ventral part of the little alligator had given way, and the same had happened to the little Caribbean sting-ray. But the vessel later to be known as the Oxoxoco Bottle seemed to glow. I picked it up carelessly, saying to a friend who was spending that evening with me: ‘Now what this is, I don’t know——’ when it slipped from between my dusty fingers and broke against the base of a brass lamp.

  My friend said: ‘Some sort of primitive cigar-holder, I imagine. See? There’s still a cigar inside it…. Or is it a stick of cinnamon?’

  ‘What would they be doing with cinnamon in Mexico?’ I asked, picking up this pale brown cylinder. It had a slightly oily texture and retained a certain aromatic odour. ‘What would you make of a thing like that?’

  He took it from me gingerly, and rustled it at his ear between thumb and forefinger much in the manner of a would-be connoisseur ‘listening to’ the condition of a cigar. An outer leaf curled back. The interior was pale yellow. He cried: ‘Bless my heart, man, it’s paper – thin paper – and written on, too, unless my eyes deceive me.’

  So we took the pieces of the bottle and that panatella-shaped scroll to the British Museum. Professor Mayhew, of Ceramics, took charge of the broken bottle. Dr Wills, of Ancient Manuscripts, went to work on the scroll with all the frenzied patience characteristic of such men, who will hunch their backs and go blind working twenty years on a fragment of Dead Sea scroll.

  Oddly enough, he had this paper cigar unrolled and separated into leaves within six weeks, when he communicated with me, saying: ‘This is not an ancient manuscript. It is scarcely fifty years old. It was written in pencil, upon faint-ruled paper torn out of some reporter’s notebook not later than 1914. This is not my pigeon. So I gave it to Brownlow, of Modern Manuscripts. Excuse me.’ And he disappeared through a book-lined door in the library.

  Dr Brownlow had the papers on his table, covered with a heavy sheet of plate-glass. He said to me, in a dry voice: ‘If this is a hoax, Mr Kersh, I could recommend more profitable ways of expending the Museum’s time and your own. If this is not a hoax, then it is one of the literary discoveries of the century. The Americans would be especially interested in it. They could afford to buy it, being millionaires. We could not. But it is curious, most curious.’

  ‘What is it?’ I asked.

  He took his time, in the maddening manner of such men, and said: ‘Considering the advanced age of the putative author of this narrative, there are certain discrepancies in the handwriting. The purported author of this must have been a very old man in about 1914, at which I place the date of its writing. Furthermore, he suffered with asthma and rheumatism. Yet I don’t know. If you will allow me to make certain inquiries, and keep this holograph a few days more …?’

  I demanded: ‘What man? What rheumatism? What do you mean?’

  He said: ‘Beg pardon, I thought you knew. This –’ and he tapped the plate-glass ‘– pretends to be the last written work of the American author, Ambrose Bierce. I have taken the liberty of having it photographed for your benefit. If we may keep this until next Monday or so for further investigation …?’

  ‘Do that,’ I said, and took from him a packet of photographs, considerably enlarged from the narrow notebook sheets.

  ‘He was a great writer!’ I said. ‘One of America’s greatest.’

  The Modern Manuscripts man shrugged. ‘Well, well. He was in London from 1872 to 1876. A newspaperman, a newspaperman. They used to call him “Bitter” Bierce. When he went back to America he worked – if my memory does not deceive me – mainly in San Francisco, wrote for such publications as The Examiner, The American, Cosmopolitan, and such-like. Famous for his bitter tongue and his ghostly stories. He had merit. Academic circles in the United States will give you anything you like for this – if it is genuine. If … Now I beg you to excuse me.’ Before we parted, he added, with a little smile: ‘I hope it is genuine, for your sake and ours – because that would certainly clear up what is getting to be a warm dispute among our fellows in the Broken Crockery Department …’

  *

  Mount Popocatepetl looms over little Oxoxoco which, at first glance, is a charming and picturesque village, in the Mexican sense of the term. In this respect it closely resembles its human counterparts. Oxoxoco is picturesque and interesting, indeed; at a suitable distance, and beyond the range of one’s nostrils. Having become acquai
nted with it, the disillusioned traveller looks to the snowy peak of the volcano for a glimpse of cool beauty in this lazy, bandit-haunted, burnt-up land. But if he is a man of sensibility, he almost hopes that the vapours on the peak may give place to some stupendous eructation of burning gas, and a consequent eruption of molten lava which, hissing down into the valley, may cauterise this ulcer of a place from the surface of the tormented earth, covering all traces of it with a neat poultice of pumice stone and a barber’s dusting of the finest white ashes.

  They used to call me a good hater. This used to be so. I despised my contemporaries, I detested my wife – a feeling she reciprocated – and had an impatient con tempt for my sons; and for their grandfather, my father. London appalled me, New York disgusted me, and California nauseated me. I almost believe that I came to Mexico for something fresh to hate. Oxco, Taxco, Cuernavaca – they were all equally distasteful to me, and I knew that I should feel similarly about the (from a distance enchanting) village of Oxoxoco. But I was sick and tired, hunted and alone, and I needed repose, because every bone in my body, at every movement, raised its sepulchral protest. But there was to be no rest for me in Oxoxoco.

  Once the traveller sets foot in this village, he is affronted by filth and lethargy. The men squat, chin on knee, smoking or sleeping. There is a curious lifelessness about the place as it clings, a conglomeration of hovels, to the upland slope. There is only one half-solid building in Oxoxoco, which is the church. My views on religion are tolerably well known, but I made my way to this edifice to be away from the heat, the flies, and the vultures which are the street cleaners of Oxoxoco. (In this respect it is not unlike certain other cities I have visited, only in Oxoxoco the vultures have wings and no politics.) The church was comparatively cool. Resting, I looked at the painted murals. They simply christen the old bloody Aztec gods and goddesses – give them the names of saints – and go on worshipping in the old savage style.